Fun Fact Friday: Beauty of Ruminant Animals

Here at Lockewood Acres we love all of our animals. This week’s spotlight is on our own personal lawn mowers: our sheep!!

Ruminant animals include cattle, goats, sheep, buffalo, deer, giraffes, camels, and elk. Ruminants have a unique digestive system in which they digest feed in the rumen before it goes to the stomach for further digestion.

Ruminant animals have the ability to consume and digest shrubs, low-quality grasses, and other vegetation and upcycle it into protein and energy for themselves. This is not only a naturally sustainable act, but it also has several benefits including: weed control, soil turnover, and minimizing brush fires.

Grazing ruminants help reduce widespread and severe wildfires, which as you know is vital to California. In 2017, grazing cattle consumed 11.6 billion pounds of fine fuel (grasses and other vegetation) over 19.4 million acres of rangeland. Larger, more severe fires would occur without the millions of grazing ruminants in California.

Lockewood Acres’ ruminants also reduce the amount of landscaping we have to do. More time for us to produce and pick our delicious fresh products.

Please let us know if you have any questions or have a fact you want us to recognize next Friday!



Stats and Research by: Felix et al. 2020. The benefits of cattle grazing for reducing fire fuels and hazard. BenitoLink. Accessible at: https://benitolink.com/the-benefits-of-cattle-grazing-for-reducing-fire-fuels-and-hazard/.